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“If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning / I’d hammer in the evening, all over this land,” sang the late, great Pete Seeger. Notice he did not say that if he had a hammer he’d submit it to peer review or place it in his tenure and promotions file. He’d hammer it. All over the land! Of course, while on the blacklist in the 1950s, a good stretch of Seeger’s land was made up of college campuses across the United States (Seeger was a nomadic pragmatist: he had a message to spread and, as far as audiences went, he would take what he could get). Still, Seeger’s signal would not be bent or broken or, least of all, subjected to any sort of bureaucratic metrics.

It is funny that I only came to fully appreciate Seeger’s commitment to communication (just one of the legacies of the folk revival in general) after working with the Czech computer scientist and programmer Mirek Plíhal, who is not even a fan of American protest music but who nonetheless embodies its ethics. I met Mirek in Dawson City, Yukon, where the two of us were artists-in-residence together at the Klondike Institute of Art & Culture in the spring of 2013. Mirek was there to work on an app about Newfoundland, and I was there to work on a collection of Klondike attempted murder ballads, but we ended up collaborating instead on a project called Artificially Intelligent Folk Songs of Canada (see www.folksingularity.com). Basically we built a computer that can access the totality of the history of Canadian folk music and generate new yet hyper-legitimate compositions from the source data. It was a strange, beautiful brew: humanism meets science, art meets technology, East meets West, etc.

In 2014, one of my goals is to update this blog on a semi-regular basis (every week? Every two weeks? We’ll see how it goes). I’m starting here by outlining some topics that I hope to cover with the help of guest bloggers in the next few months.

Part of this effort will involve expanding our guest bloggers to include anonymous writers, so that we can try to cover some of these issues with greater honesty. Many people have approached me to say that they want to write something, but have said they are afraid to speak their truths online. I hope that this blog will provide these important voices with some writing space soon. (If you haven’t contacted me yet with an idea because you have been hesitating to put your name on something, I hope that you will take this as an open invitation!).

By Sarah HudsonPh.D. candidate, Department of Biology, University of New Brunswick

“Have kids while you’re in grad school…I did it, it was great!” The advice came from a well-respected, friendly professor in my department. I was 23, single, and in the second year of a master’s degree in science.

In many ways, the advice was good. There are jolly reasons to have your kids while still in grad school. It can be tricky to envision jumping into parenthood at the beginning of a degree, when you likely have commitments to taking classes, teaching, delving into your own research, and possibly doing fieldwork. However, in many graduate programs you can at some point be flexible with your work schedule, and parenting-friendly arrangements can be made. I have fellow-grad student friends who found time to get their theses written between their kids’ naps, after they had gone to bed at night or with the help of a sitter to entertain their kids while they wrote from home. Others travelled as a family doing fieldwork in remote locations. These friends managed to juggle the responsibility of graduate school and parenting, in order to get both jobs done.

By Janet MullinDepartments of History at the University of New Brunswick and St. Thomas University, Fredericton, Canada

There’s an urban myth out there that says part-time academics (aka “lecturers”, “adjuncts”, &c) aren’t really professors, because they aren’t required to do research. If it ain’t in the job description, it ain’t happening. Part-timers are a) too busy teaching b) working at other jobs to keep a roof over their heads c) not interested in doing something for which they won’t be paid.

Right.

As most of us already know, that’s not even close to true. Sure, we part-timers may have to put more emphasis on our teaching – that’s what’s bringing in the bacon, after all – but even course-prep writing is still writing. Besides, there’s nothing like doing lots of writing for undergrads to make you itch to get back to the crafting of sentences, the building of arguments, that got you that PhD in the first place. Most of my lecture notes are peppered with crossed-out clever phrases and erudite references that have bombed in the classroom. The only way I’ll get to use them is to write for other academics.

My friends over at Hook & Eye posted today about dreaming communities of care in the academy. What a wonderful thought. I love it. And I have to say that I have experienced the generosity that they speak of here more often than I have not in my academic life. I try to pay it forward as much as I can, but I am also someone who is imperfectly generous and who can have difficulty setting boundaries on such things at times. I imagine most of us struggle with this.

I have given a couple of invited lectures on what might be loosely described as “professional development” since finishing my PhD. Along with a colleague and friend, I have also organized a few sessions on this topic at the annual meeting of my scholarly association, the Universities Art Association of Canada. I’ve gotten quite a bit of feedback on these lectures and sessions (good, great, bad, and ugly!) and I’d like to find a way to continue these conversations online. I’m also thinking about my former graduate student self and some of the things I worried about at that stage in my life (not being good enough, getting a job, if and when I would have children). I don’t have any easy answers to these subjects now, because I am still figuring a lot of it out myself. But in conversations with graduate students and emerging faculty a lot of these same themes reoccur. What I would like to do here is write about some of these things myself, while also soliciting the writings of others who inspire me.

This is a sketch I doodled of myself during a recent academic event. I drew a lot when I was a kid. I never do it anymore (you might see why after looking at this). But this represents how I felt while listening to someone smart talk while at the same time I was thinking about whether or not my kid was asleep. Yes, I have entered into that strange zone that so many professional mamas before me have experienced and expressed, of trying to divide yourself in half and on being amazing at two very hard things. One friend described clipping her newborn’s fingernails as being harder than writing a dissertation and a first book combined. Another claimed that she was constantly searching for words postpartum that just would not come to mind, to the point that she referred to a paddle as a canoe-stick. I really (REALLY) hate the term “mommy-brain,” so I will forever describe what I’m experiencing instead as canoe-stick brain. It seems to make more sense anyway.